Thanks, Julio, and I'm in agreement with your post also.
> The emphasis on the (historically-materialistic) aspects of the labor
> theory of value (the historicity of value, of the duality of labor as
> producer of commodities, of commodity exchange as being fundamentally
> a specifically social form in which total social labor gets
> reallocated) was uniquely Marx's. They are all missing in Smith and
> Ricardo. A hint of this is still missing in most modern economic
> theorists (with few exceptions, Trygve Haavelmo and -- more recently
> -- William Sharpe, to name a pair). I say this, because the way I
> read Mike's claim is not as saying that Marx was pointing out of labor
> theory of value in this general sense, but rather pointing out of the
> *Ricardian* apparatus to grasp price fluctuations. In the fundamental
> sense, Marx's theory of value remains a 100% labor theory of value.
Yes - when I said 'the microeconomic sense of value theory' I meant relative prices. I agree that this side of value is much more important to Marx. I don't think it can be said categorically that Smith and Ricardo were not on this wavelength to some extent - Smith after all begins with 'the division of labour' - but only Marx puts it in proper historical perspective and develops the brilliant concept of commodity fetishism.
There's one more sense of 'value' that neither of us have mentioned but which I think is perhaps Marx's greatest innovation - and that's the sense of 'value in motion' developed in those early chapters of Vol 1 after the chapter on money. This is not value as relative price/exchange-value, but the way in which the potential for storing value and reproducing it by putting it through the circuit of capital. It makes perfect sense to develop it naturally out of exchange-value - but in neoclassical economics these are completely separate realms.
> Finally, I'll say that, at its highest level, today's economic theory
> views demand and supply are not viewed as "schedules" or "curves" but
> as *mappings* or -- more restrictively -- as (multivariate)
> *functions* of "parameters" reflecting some "fundamentals" or (in the
> dynamic specification) some "initial conditions." Schedules and
> curves are merely used as didactic devices. But the main point that
> (I think) Mike makes stands, namely that in modern economic theory,
> supply and demand are extremely general concepts that don't exclude
> the labor theory of value in its most general
> (historical-materialistic) sense. On the contrary, at least to me,
> they make much more sense when you view them in the framework of
> Marx's labor theory of value.
Yes - I agree - I don't think the spirit of Marx is lost at all by conceptualising it with such techniques, and it actually can provide firmer and subtler underpinnings. There's not reason to be afraid of 'supply-and-demand', which is as you say more a general language for organising theory rather than a theory itself - because the real game is explaining the shape of the curves (or the mappings or whatever) and relating it to time and dynamic processes, equilibrium or otherwise.
Mike Beggs